A foray into the heart of social nerdiness

Delving in Deep

I foolishly promised some of my players more dungeon crawls. That thumping sound? That’s the sound of my head hitting my desk as I try to wrap my head around a whole new way of thinking of building adventures. THUD THUD THUD.

It’s a whole new way of thinking. It’s a very linear way to run a game, which is probably good, as large as this group is getting. It’s easier to split up the party, so you can have assistant DMs in place. You can still drive story forward. It is all a good way to run a —THUD.

I keep telling myself this, but there is a part of me that it runs immediately counter to. The deconstructionist (of the Foucault school of thought no less! *shame*) part of me that wishes to break down every aspect of a story to see how it works rails against such… prosaic adventures. It’s been done, how much more can it be broken down?

Really, the answer is it can be broken down a lot more. A LOT MORE. And I know that, that there are lots of good stories that can be told in a dungeon setting. Perhaps the real reason behind my feet-dragging on this matter is because I don’t want to introduce yet another NPC: the dungeon itself.

While not exactly (in most cases) sentient, the dungeon is a sort of organism in of itself. Think of movies like The Cube or games like Bioshock. The environment is an important aspect of both stories, and it changes and mutates as the story changes. I think I’m a bit intimidated by the scope that is offered up in such a situation. I’m not even really sure where to start, although Monte Cook’s The World’s Shortest (Yet Technically Complete) Adventure is a summation of what I should be doing. But to think of a space like that…. it’s an alien and confusing process for me. But then again, it took me a long time to figure out how actual NPCs work, and the only way to get around it, is to actually, you know, work on it.

Grumbley grumble grumble. More work and planning. I thought being a DM was supposed to be fun and easy. Grumble grumble grumble.